New Delhi: Google doodle on Tuesday commemorated the 130th birth anniversary of Oskar Schlemmer, a revolutionary German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer. Schlemmer is most fondly remembered for his “Triadic Ballet”, where the performers convert them to bulbous mechanical creatures wearing metallic masks.
Born on September 4 in 1888, Schlemmer was the youngest of six children who attended art school before traveling to in Weimar, Germany to join Walter Gropius’s avant-garde Bauhaus, where he became director of stage research and production.
Schlemmer eventually left the Bauhaus in1929 and moved to Breslau to work at the Akademie, but he was forced to leave after the Wall Street Crash. He then went on to work in Berlin. He worked in the German capital until 1933 when he had to forcibly resign over pressure from the Nazi’s.
The extraordinary artist not just restricted himself to ballet, but also experimented with painting and sculpture. However, it was his creative theater designs that are most vividly remembered for influencing future artists like David Bowie.
The pioneer of ballet had once described the themes of his work as, “the human figure in space, its moving and stationary functions, sitting, lying, walking, standing” as being “as simple as they are universally valid.”
Schlemmer’s groundbreaking approach to ballet broke with all traditional convention to explore the relationship between the body and space in new and exciting ways. In his words, a ballet performance is “‘artistic metaphysical mathematics,” and a “party in form and colour.” Schlemmer’s ‘Triadic Ballet,’ premiered in Stuttgart, Germany in 1922.
Schlemmer’s work was also featured in the notorious Nazi exhibition Degenerate Art.
Google paid its tribute to the German artist in its doodle by exhibiting his innovative approach to ballet. Oskar Schlemmer died in Baden-Baden in 1943.
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